Ten-Machine Lab, Six Days to Submission: Triage Before Repair
A government senior secondary school in Mansa runs an NSQF IT lab with 10 identical desktops (4 GB RAM, 500 GB HDD, Windows 10, antivirus licence expired 8 months ago), one inkjet printer shared through a manual USB switch, and a 4 Mbps broadband line. This week's complaints: PC-3 takes about six minutes to reach the desktop and Word closes by itself; the shared folder \LAB-PC1\projects opens on PCs 1, 2 and 5 but asks for a password on PCs 6 and 7; the printer prints one job and then three blank pages before the next job works; students save projects to the Desktop of whichever PC they sit at, and 'project_final.docx' on PC-7 now opens with 'corrupted, unreadable content'; power fails two or three times a day and the single 600 VA UPS is connected only to PC-1. Last week a student's pen drive contained 'setup.exe', which was run on PC-3. Project submission is in six days.
1. Rank the actions for the next two days and justify the order. Identify the one action that is not optional and say what makes it different from the others.
Read the worked answer
Order by irreversibility, not by annoyance.
- Preserve the students' work. Copy every Desktop folder from all 10 PCs to PC-1 and to an external hard disk today, before any repair. Six days of project work is the only thing in this lab that cannot be regenerated; every later step (scan, reinstall, permission change) can destroy or hide files.
- Isolate PC-3 from the network and scan it with an updated offline scanner, or rebuild it from a clean image. The pen-drive 'setup.exe' plus a six-minute boot plus Word crashing is a coherent story: possible malware, damaged startup entries, and a machine that may be reinfecting the others. Renew the antivirus on all 10 - an expired licence is an open door, not a nuisance.
- Fix printing (spooler and blank pages) - cheap, high visibility, needed for the submission printouts.
- Fix sharing on PCs 6 and 7 - a permissions issue, minutes of work once diagnosed.
- Power protection - move the UPS to cover at least PC-1 and the network switch, and raise a written request for a second UPS; two to three power cuts a day is the root cause behind the corrupted .docx.
Not optional: step 1, the backup, together with taking PC-3 off the network. Every other item is recoverable and merely inconvenient; lost project files and an active infection are not. Do the backup first even if it pushes the printer fix to tomorrow.
2. For each symptom - slow boot with Word crashing, password prompt on PCs 6 and 7, blank pages after the first job, and the corrupted .docx - give the most likely cause and one specific check to confirm it, without reformatting anything yet.
Read the worked answer
Slow boot + Word crashing (PC-3). Likely causes: startup programs bloated, a failing disk, or malware from the pen drive. Checks: Task Manager > Startup tab for entries; Event Viewer > Windows Logs > System for disk errors; run chkdsk /scan and check SMART status; run a full scan with an updated definition file from a clean machine. Confirm before repairing.
Password prompt on 6 and 7 only. If the folder opens on three PCs, the share itself works, so the fault is per-machine or per-account. Checks: is PCs 6 and 7 in the same workgroup (System > About); is the share permission set to a specific user rather than Everyone/Authenticated Users; is a stale saved credential stuck in Credential Manager. Fastest confirmation: on PC-6 open Command Prompt and run net use \\LAB-PC1\projects and read the error code.
Blank pages after the first job. Likely a stuck print queue holding a second, empty document, or a clogged/empty cartridge that only shows after a page. Checks: open Printers > See what's printing, cancel all jobs, restart the Print Spooler service, print the printer's own self-test page (this separates printer hardware from Windows).
Corrupted 'project_final.docx'. Likely a FAT32 pen drive pulled out without ejecting, or a save interrupted by a power cut. Checks: look for a hidden ~$project_final.docx lock file and for Word's recovery pane; try File > Open > Recover Text from Any File / Open and Repair on a copy. Also untick 'Hide extensions for known file types' so the real extension is visible - a .doc renamed .docx fails exactly this way.
3. Design a file-sharing and backup routine for the lab given 4 Mbps broadband and two to three power cuts a day, including a naming convention, and state what should NOT be done with cloud storage and pen drives.
Read the worked answer
Sharing. One shared folder on PC-1 (the machine on the UPS, wired to the switch): \LAB-PC1\projects, with one subfolder per class and per student named by roll number (10A-14). Use standard NTFS permissions - teachers read/write, students write to their own folder - rather than a 'Everyone, Full Control' share, which is how the password prompts and silent deletions start. Map it as drive P: on all 10 PCs so nobody saves to the Desktop again.
Naming convention. RollNo_ProjectName_v01.docx, incrementing v02, v03 - never 'final' or 'final_final'. The rule: the previous version is never overwritten, so a corrupted save costs one version, not a project.
Backup. Daily at the end of the last period, copy P: to an external hard disk; use two disks and keep one with the coordinator off-site. Weekly, zip the whole folder with the date in the filename. Before any repair or reinstall, take an extra copy - the riskiest moment for data is not the power cut, it is the technician.
What not to do. Do not rely on cloud sync as the primary store at 4 Mbps: an upstream of a few hundred kbps means large files sync for hours and a power cut leaves half-uploaded or conflicting copies. If cloud is used at all, upload one zipped submission per class, once, from PC-1. And do not plug unknown pen drives into lab PCs; if one must be used, scan it first, disable autorun and keep file extensions visible.